Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it.

There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval

Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright corner of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile.

I miss Vance with a fierceness we reserve for the absent who cannot return.

In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist.

I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright corner of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile.

But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.

Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.”